My View: Transform Rockford needs everyone to participate

Thursday

Feb 13, 2014 at 3:00 PM

Fourteen years ago I remember seeing handbills and posters advertising a meeting at Court Street Methodist Church. NO MORE BOARDED-UP HOUSES it proclaimed. I was curious. Arriving, I entered a packed church, the first two pews filled with politicians and bureaucrats. A slide projector was showing dozens of abandoned homes. About 20 people sat in folding chairs at the front, facing us. One by one each got up and gave a speech precisely timed: say, one-and-a-half minutes. Precision. They challenged those politicians: Promise to tear down or rehab a specific number of those houses within 18 months. They asked for a response then and there. Wow! A powerful meeting - and a year and a half later, as I remember, those officials kept their word! We were cleaning up Rockford. Wow.

That was the work of the CNO, Council of Neighborhood Organizations, eventually renamed "Congregations and Neighborhoods Organized." They'd been trained by the Gamaliel foundation, inspired by Saul Alinsky, with members from many churches and neighborhoods.

A few years later, at another large CNO gathering at St. Luke's Missionary Baptist Church, a diverse audience filled the sanctuary. Candidates Chuck Jefferson and Gloria Cardenas Cudia were there. A young woman speaker was crying. She pleaded for Illinois legislation to allow undocumented youths to attend college and get a driver's license. It felt strange, watching her cry, pleading for action. (This was a precursor of the Dream Act.)

Suddenly, about 20 people in a balcony screamed at the two politicians, insisting on commitment to work for this legislation, demanding they promise to support it: "SI OR NON, YES OR NO!" they screamed. Later I heard these Hispanic people had come from Chicago. The atmosphere was electric.

The outcome: Mainstream supporters of CNO abandoned it in droves. Rockford's people had been shocked at the outburst. CNO became a tiny group. A hired organizer working with CNO left when her grant ended. Eventually, a new community organization was formed: the Neighborhood Network, determinedly apolitical, organized to help neighborhood groups.

The lesson I learned from this was that raw emotions and confrontation like that were not tolerated. Mainstream people in Rockford were frightened. They quit supporting CNO.

Transform Rockford aims to bring everyone - EVERYONE - to the table. That's a big order. For marginalized people to choose to be involved, fully participating and empowered in the transformation of our region, something new and radical needs to happen.

Many of us realize that a "Truth and Reconciliation" process is needed for people's pain to be acknowledged. We all need to hold ourselves accountable regarding the "brutal facts." Mike Schablaske of Transform Rockford says, "We need to be willing to call each other out and to be called out."

How can we do that? It will be "messy." Not quiet. Not orderly. We NEED everyone to participate, including poor people, the marginalized and also those who are scared of raw emotion, the very people who abandoned CNO.

I discovered a way this can happen here, as described in Arnold Mindell's books, "Sitting in the Fire," and "The Deep Democracy of Open Forums." Large gatherings would be animated, with heated exchanges and touching encounters, bringing people together in amazing ways, actually preventing the violence people fear by raising awareness.

We need to have events that will engage people who are deeply suspicious that anything hatched by the leaders of Woodward would take seriously the needs of people who are poor or out of the mainstream. I believe Mindell's "world work" will bring us together in ways no one here has ever imagined. Want to help? Contact me.

Harlan Johnson is a community therapist. He can be reached at 815-968-5433 or email harlan@actualizations.net.